3. News Headlines

It’s no surprise then that headlines containing latest news work so well at attracting our attention.

Therefore, if you have news about your product or service, announce it in the headline.

Maybe you’ve introduced a new product.

Added a new feature or made significant improvements to an existing one or,

Came up with a new application for a product.

All these could form a base for great headlines:

Wunderlist is Now Microsoft!

Introducing the New Omnifocus.

Things for OSX. Finally with Folders.

We’re Now Shipping to Canada.

News headlines work particularly well when used in ads targeted to Custom Audiences based on past customers.

Take this headline for instance:

“Things for Mac. Finally with Folders.”

It would be hard to understand to anyone except a Things app user who suffers from the apps lack of folders support. And thus, targeting the headline at current app users would surely result in high CTR.

4. How-to Headlines

Starting your headline with “how-to” is a surefire way to grab attention.

To quote Bob Bly:

“Many advertising writers claim if you begin with a how-to, you can’t write a bad headline. They may be right.”

How-to headlines work as they offer a promise of information and solution to a reader’s problems, i.e.

How to manage a remote team.

How to grow your business with social media.

How to increase your ad revenue.

These headlines are also super easy to write, providing that you know your audience and have identified their main pain points, of course.

5. Question Headlines

Did you know that questions are the main brain influencers?

A good question can arouse our curiosity and yes, draw attention.

But for that to happen, the question must relate to something a reader empathize with or would like to know more about.

For instance:

“Is the way you use social media costing you reputation and sales?”

When writing question headlines, make sure that you ask about something a reader already knows about.

But try to communicate that there might be something they don’t know about it yet.

This strategy is called curiosity gap and it focuses on the fact that we are not curious about something we know nothing about.

But once we discover that our knowledge is plagued, we immediately want to know more.

6. Command Headlines

Command headlines tell readers exactly what to do. They start with a strong verb demanding action and proceed to describe what action the reader should take. For instance:

Grab This Free Course Now!

Get On the List Before It’s Too Late!

Try Ignoring this Ad!

7. Reason-Why Headlines

This is one of the most common techniques used when writing list posts blog titles but it can be used equally well in advertising.

The “Reason why” headlines work in a simple way – they suggest tips or benefits of using a product or service.

8. Testimonial Headlines

You know:

No one can sell your product better than a customer.

Their words are often the best proof to convince prospects that your product or service has helped others and thus could help someone else too.

And sometimes the easiest way to create an attention-grabbing headline is to use a direct quote from a client:

“[Product] helped me increase sales by 132%”

“After switching to [Product] our productivity has never been better.”

This type of headline could work really well if you’re targeting Lookalike Audiences. Presenting a testimonial by someone similar to the target audience would make the ad more relevant to them.

Strategies

There are also certain strategies that could help you make the most of the formulas we’ve just discussed.

In this (amazing!) post, Courtney Seiter lists 8 of them. Some of these strategies relate to formulas we’ve already discussed in the post (i.e. curiosity, questions or how-to’s).

There are however some interesting ones there.

I’m only going to summarize them here but I recommend you read Courtney’s post to find out the psychology behind each of these strategies:

Surprising a Reader

This strategy works because our brains love novelty. Apparently our brain’s pleasure centers activate when we face unexpected but pleasant things. And thus surprise is a stimulating factor that gets our attention.

Using Negatives

Did you know that negative superlatives (i.e. worst, never) make the headline perform better than positive ones (i.e. best, always)?

Yup.

According to a study by Outbrain, headlines with positive superlatives performed 29% worse than ones with negatives in them.

Referencing the Audience

I’m sure you know quite well how important it is to properly target your ads.

Let’s face it, it can make or break your entire campaign.

But…

Did you know that you could also highlight the audience in the headline and prequalify your leads in the process?

Simply reference who you target in the ad’s headline to communicate who you really want to talk to.

How to act on this information

Take a look at your product, audience and campaign goals to see what formula would work best for it.

Comments

When I make Facebook ads, Facebook gives me a warning that my headline should be no longer than 25 characters, but I see lots of examples here with headlines longer than that. Is there a workaround? Also, the text seems to be limited to 90 characters…if I go beyond that, will it reject the ad or create an automatic “read more” prompt? Thanks so much for the informative posts!

Facebook Ads Manager is pretty limited and they apply the most restrictive length validation (the one for the right column) to every Ad. If you use external tools like AdEspresso or the Power Editor you’ll be able to write longer text.

The 90 characters limit is very low as well, the real limit is actually 250 if I remember correctly. Sometime it will appear with the “Read More” prompt, but for sure not after just 90 chars!

Hey guys I totally love how well you’ve helped out the FB community of FB Advertisers that love jedi ads campaigns that perform with well tracked data statistics that make it easy to profit more higher with testing measures that adespresso offers. I believe in the e

Greetings. I just joined this forum and I’m excited to find so many interesting people here. I hope someone from you will give me some writing help. I discussed a blogpost about custom writing help with my friends yesterday. How do you think, can I use it for my blogging texts? Thanks you all! Grant

It looks like some of the text in your content are runnikng off the screen. Can someone else please comment and let me know if this iss happening to them too? This could be a issue with mmy browser because I’ve had tnis happen before. Thanks

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[…] create the most effective headline, I took some pointers from the article on adespresso “11 Formulas and Strategies to Write Irresistible Ad Headlines” by Pawel Grabowski. In one of his tips he suggest to just use a direct headline that will grab the […]

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